Table Of ContentNewton’s
Ark
by D.A.Hill
Book One of the Emulation Trilogy
Copyright © 2012 D.A.Hill
All Rights Reserved
This is a work of fiction.
Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead
is purely co-incidental.
To my parents
who always believed in me
and
to my wife Marie
who always sees the best in me.
prologue
January 2050
The man sank into the reclining chair with a sigh of relief. Several hours of
eating and drinking had made him tired, but he would not have traded this
moment for the world. He had celebrated way too hard, but he did not regret
that; it was not every day you celebrated your sixtieth birthday in space,
surrounded by your loved ones.
“Come on granddad, tell us the story,” the girl pleaded as she snuggled up
beside him.
“Which story would that be?” he replied, pretending he did not know exactly
which story his granddaughter Elizabeth meant.
“The story,” she replied with a playfully exasperated tone. “The story of how
we left the Earth.” She also knew that her grandfather knew exactly which story
she meant.
“Oh that story. But you’ve heard it so many times before my dear.”
“We know granddad, but you know kids,” his fifteen year old grandson Eric
said. He pretended not to share his nine year old sister’s excitement. “They like
to hear the same stories over and over again.”
He knew that was true. His grandchildren really did not tire of the story no
matter how many times he told it. It was fortunate then, for him and for them,
that he never tired of telling it, not even the very sanitized version he had to tell.
There were parts of the story that were much too dark for children. And there
were things they just were not supposed to know. At least not yet.
“In that case, Eric,” the man replied with a conspiratorial wink, “I suppose I
should tell the story. To keep your sister happy you understand.” He knew Eric
liked the story just as much as Elizabeth did, maybe more since he was old
enough to remember his part in it. But at fifteen Eric was trying on adulthood for
size; his grandfather was not going to be the one to burst his bubble by pointing
out that it was still a size or two too big.
He waited for his grandchildren to settle before continuing. As he surveyed
the room he smiled the smile of a man completely contented with his life,
contented despite knowing that everything he saw was an illusion, and contented
despite the fact these children he loved so much were not really his
grandchildren. In fact they were not even real children. Hell, in ways that most
people back on Earth would have considered important, he was not even himself
—but he was not supposed to mention that…
chapter 1
March 2030
Colonel Manny Smith went over the mission briefing in his mind as he
lowered himself into the pilot’s seat and the technicians began attaching cables
to his head and body. A routine reconnaissance mission would be a nice change
of pace after some of the recent missions he had flown. He knew that sooner or
later he would make a stupid mistake unless he eased off a little.
Not that he minded the excitement—combat pilots were known to be
adrenaline junkies and Manny Smith was no exception—but given the shortage
of pilots who could do what he did, he had been pushed, and been pushing
himself, too hard for too long. Only a quarter of the pilots who entered the drone
program graduated, so there was always a shortage. It was not their flying skills
that were the problem—only experienced pilots were selected for the program—
but the psychological effects of the link. Those who could not tolerate it never
flew again. The lucky ones were quietly discharged on medical grounds with a
generous pension and a new life in some out of the way town. The unlucky ones
saw out their years in a Veterans’ Administration psychiatric facility.
It seemed a high price to pay but UAVs—Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as the
drones were officially known—were now the way the US Air Force went to war.
Manned aircraft had three critical weaknesses. The first problem was it took
years and large amounts of money to train combat-ready pilots, so strategy and
tactics were too often constrained by the need to conserve this scarce resource. It
was not a new problem. As a military history buff, Manny Smith knew the very
same problem had nearly brought Fighter Command to its knees during the
Battle of Britain way back in 1940, ninety years ago. The lesson, which had
stood the test of time, was that it was faster and easier to replace planes than
pilots.
The second problem was that the American public had grown accustomed to
wars in which enemy deaths numbered in the thousands while American
casualties were virtually non-existent. After the fiasco in Iraq twenty-five years
ago, the US had avoided ever again putting significant boots on the ground, or
pilots in the air. Doing so just gave America’s enemies the opportunity to shoot
at, blow up, kidnap and generally maim and murder young Americans. The
United States had decided that it was much better to kill bad guys from a
distance.
The final problem was the constraints the physical limitations of the human
body placed on the performance of a manned aircraft; a drone could be built with
much higher maneuverability thresholds than any manned aircraft. America’s
enemies had realized the same thing; in 2030 sending a manned aircraft into a
combat zone was like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Manny pulled on the virtual reality headset. There he was in the cockpit of his
aircraft sitting on the runway in Incirlik, Turkey ready to open the throttle for
take off. A lot had changed since the early days of the drone program in
Afghanistan, twenty years ago. Back then piloting a drone was like playing a
video game; you sat in a dark room watching a low resolution feed from the
drone’s cameras on a video screen and controlled your aircraft with a joystick.
Now, with the virtual reality headset, the feedback chair he was sitting in, and
massive amounts of data coming from the drone’s sensors, the pilot felt exactly
like he was in the aircraft flying it.
—o—
The mission had been uneventful for the first ninety-seven minutes. It was in
the ninety-eighth minute that it all began to go pear shaped. Manny’s
instruments indicated that an enemy missile, almost certainly Chinese, had a
lock on his aircraft. “So much for routine,” he cursed to himself. For all the
surveillance technology his country had at its command, the intelligence that
filtered down to guys like him on the front line could be maddeningly inaccurate.
Unfortunately all the computers in the world could not tell you what was going
on in the mind of your enemy. For that you needed human intelligence,
HUMINT as they called it—operatives on the ground who could blend in with
the local population for long periods of time. Unfortunately HUMINT was an
area where the United States had been seriously lacking longer than Manny had
been wearing a uniform.
Manny put his plane into a hard dive to the left. The aircraft was pulling 10Gs
but the feedback chair cleverly attenuated that to 6Gs, using his physiological
limits to tell him that the aircraft was nearing its engineering limits. The
information on his heads up display indicated that the Chinese missile was still
right behind him.
Manny was flying one of the most sophisticated aircraft ever built, a design
the United States had thrown its best minds and trillions of dollars into
developing so they could keep ahead of the Chinese. Too bad the Chinese were
throwing their best minds and whatever trillions of dollars was equivalent to in
their money at building weapons systems to defeat it.
Most of the time American aircraft still managed to come out on top. Most of
the time, but not this time. Manny was pushing his aircraft to the limit, using
every trick he knew, and still he could not shake the Chinese missile. He
reluctantly concluded that his aircraft would soon be nothing but a pile of junk
cluttering a poor farmer’s field in some anonymous country in Central Asia. Not
for the first time, and probably not for the last, Manny did as he was trained to
do and pushed the abort button. Like any pilot worth his wings he hated losing
an aircraft, but he definitely appreciated knowing he would be going home to his
daughter tonight.
—o—
Manny felt the virtual reality headset and the monitoring cables being
removed. As his eyes adjusted to the light, the blurry outline of a face filled his
field of view.
“Colonel Smith, can you hear me?” a female voice asked.
Manny nodded as his vision cleared. He hated this feeling. As much as he
loved flying, at forty he was getting too old for this. It was disorienting enough
when you completed a mission and the link was closed down in a controlled
manner. When you had to abort and the link was cut abruptly, it left you feeling
like you had the worst hangover for days—without the pleasure of getting drunk
first.
Manny smiled as he recognized the voice as belonging to a particularly cute
technician. He had almost asked her out many times, but always changed his
mind at the last minute; raising a daughter on his own made it all seem way too
complicated. Maybe soon. He told himself he should start dating; his daughter
would be going off to college in a few months. But he had made her the center of
his personal life for so long Manny was not sure he would know how to build a
relationship with anyone else.
As the nurses and technicians continued to prod and poke him, Manny heard
the familiar voice of his commanding officer, General Rhodes.
“What happened Colonel?”
“Chinese missile got a lock on me sir,” he croaked as he sat up reaching for
his water bottle, his mouth and lips parched from several hours without
hydration. “Couldn’t shake it. Deployed counter-measures to no effect. Damn
they’re getting good.” He took a big swig. That would at least keep him going
until he could get to something a little stronger.
A technician spoke. “Bio-indicators are within an acceptable range, General.”
“Good. Manny, go home and get some rest,” his commanding officer
instructed him. “We’ll debrief you fully when the docs say you’re ready.”
“Yes sir,” he replied groggily, imagining his aircraft blown into a million tiny
pieces. He was glad he was not in it.
—o—
Manny’s world exploded in a blaze of light and heat. He had just enough time
to wonder what had gone wrong. Had the self-destruct initiated early, or had the
Chinese missile hit his aircraft before the link could be severed? Not that any of
that mattered. Either way his only real regret was knowing he would not see his
daughter graduate from college, that he would never see her get married, that he
would never be a grandfather…
—o—
Cyrus Jones was proud of the work he did. It was crucial to national security,
that was what they said, the men and women in uniforms who had recruited him.
They told him he had a chance to be a patriot. Although he would have to work
in the shadows, hidden and unacknowledged, he would be doing what needed to
be done to protect his countrymen from danger. That should be enough, even if
the government could never allow the American people to know what he did.
More importantly, he got to work at the cutting edge of technology and push
his not inconsiderable programming skills to their limit. He would have done
this work without the patriotic appeal, but being part of the military-national
security complex certainly had its advantages. Great pay, great benefits, job
security and a sense of immunity. Being part of the establishment did not put
him above the law, but he was generally left alone by the sort of petty
bureaucrats who loved to use every obscure law and regulation to lord it over
others. Even if you were guilty of a more serious transgression the law was
typically applied in the most forgiving manner possible, especially if the system
felt you could still be of use. That was how he ended up on the drone program in
the first place; he had been caught hacking some highly sensitive government
computer—not until he was well and truly inside the system of course—and
instead of locking him up they gave him his dream job!
Cyrus had done his job so well in his time on the program that not one pilot
had figured out what was really going on, and with the improvements he was
always making he was confident that none ever would. He was good, but he also
had a little help along the way. Nearly twenty years of Moore’s Law at work—
six or seven generations of processing power doubling every two or three years
—meant today’s unmanned aircraft had more than a thousand times the
computing power of the early drones.
He was not entirely sure about not telling the pilots what really happened
when they sat in the feedback chair and put on the virtual reality headset, but his
job was to take care of the software, not to worry about the wetware. Cyrus
Jones was no moral philosopher; he could not debate the morality of what they
were doing, whether it was right or wrong or the pilots should have been told.
